Re: vc-dir and Bazaar

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> From: Stephen Berman <stephen.berman@gmx.net>
> Date: Sat, 24 Jul 2010 18:20:02 +0200
> 
> Why "merge-news" instead of simply "merge"?  Is there a difference?

The "merge-news" method merges recent changes from the current
branch.  That is different from "merge".

You can see the list of all methods in the commentary at the beginning
of vc.el.

That said, I agree that the message is confusingly technical,
especially since these methods are not documented in the manual.
Perhaps submit a bug report for that.

> > Yes, but more importantly, you can commit _all_ of the pending merges
> > if you just don't mark any files.  That's what you should do most of
> > the time anyway, this being a changeset-based VCS, right?
> 
> Ah, thanks, I somehow overlooked this in the doc string.  That did what
> I wanted; but after it executed, I got this message:
> "vc-do-command: Running bzr status admin/nt/makedist.bat...FAILED
> (status 3)" and the *vc-dir* buffer showed all the files as uncommitted
> that it displayed before I had type `v'.  But when I refreshed the
> buffer, it showed only the directories.  And when I tried to commit the
> merged files from the command line, it said there were no changes to
> commit.  So `v' worked in vc-dir despite the error message and the
> non-updated display.

The error message was for "bzr status", not for "bzr ci".  So the
failed command was not the one which committed the merged files, it
was the "bzr status" command run afterwards to show the results in the
*vc-dir* buffer.

The error message usually means that some other bzr command was
running when "bzr status" was invoked.  You should be able to see what
commands where run at what times in your ~/.bzr.log file.

> Should I report a bug about that?

Yes, I think so.